Word: bbl
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...decades, the only promise most Cubans saw in the ocean north of their island was the current that carries homemade rafts to Florida. That all changed a few years ago when geologists estimated that between 5 billion bbl. and 10 billion bbl. of oil lie beneath the waters off Cuba's northwest coast. Suddenly it seemed as though the hemisphere's sole communist nation might finally end its desperate dependence on oil-rich allies like the former Soviet Union and Venezuela - and perhaps even escape its impoverished economic time warp altogether...
...exempt Big Oil from the embargo. That clamor is sure to rise - especially if Barack Obama, who is more open to dialogue with Havana, becomes the next President - now that Cuba's state oil company, Cubapetroleo, or Cupet, has announced a stunning new estimate of more than 20 billion bbl. bubbling off its shores. "This is not a game," Cupet's exploration manager, Rafael Tenreyro, assured reporters in Havana last week...
...true, those potential reserves could make Cuba a major petro player in the hemisphere. (The U.S. has reserves of 29 billion bbl.) And it could render the embargo an even more ineffective means of dislodging the aging Castro brothers, Fidel and current President Raúl. "If it really is 20 billion, then it's a game changer," says Jonathan Benjamin-Alvarado, a Cuba oil analyst at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. "It provides a lot more justification for changing elements of the embargo, just as we did when we allowed agricultural and medical sales to Cuba" a decade...
...Cuban calculation really on the level? Skeptics ask if the 20-billion-bbl. estimate is just a ploy to rekindle investor interest, at a time when falling oil prices could make the maritime find less attractive to the potential international partners Cuba needs to extract the oil. The effort is all the more urgent, they add, because reduced oil revenues could also make friends like left-wing Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez less able to aid Cuba with cut-rate crude shipments and capital to improve the island's aged refineries. "The Cuba numbers from my point of view...
...Geological Survey (USGS), a government agency, made the initial estimate of 5 billion bbl.to 10 billion bbl. for Cuba's northwest offshore sector (known as the Exclusive Economic Zone, or EEZ) in 2004. Tenreyro says Cupet's analysis is based on what he calls a more accurate comparison of similar maritime oil fields like those off Mexico's Gulf Coast. "We're talking about that magnitude," he argued last week. "We have more data" than the USGS. But Cupet, an arm of Cuba's ultra-secret communist government, hasn't offered much more evidence than that. Chris Schenk...